NEW YORK — Garbage is inevitable in the restaurant and bar business. Kitchen employees toss onion skins and meat fat into the wastebasket almost instinctively. Once-used plastic wrap and slips guarding the linens find their way into black bags for trash-day pickup. Plastic bags are ordered by the bundle and then often discarded after customers use them to take leftovers home.   At the Brooklyn natural wine bar and restaurant Rhodora, however, taking out the trash works a little differently.   The new eatery is one of a handful of establishments in various cities that have begun to operate under a zero-waste ethos, meaning they do not send any trash or food waste that enters their business to a landfill. There is not even a traditional trash can on the premises.   The aim is to lessen the restaurants’ environmental effect while running a profitable venture — with a possible added benefit of solidifying their eco-conscious bona fides among discerning clientele. Such radical idealism comes with challenges, including finding producers and distributors who can accommodate requests like compostable packaging and figuring out how to recycle broken appliances.   “We’re in the business of serving people,” said Henry Rich, a co-owner of Rhodora. “And it feels incongruent to take care of somebody for an evening and try to show them a great time, and then externalize the waste and carbon footprint of that evening onto people.”   A recent report from ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on food waste reduction, found that restaurants in the United States generate about 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, or $25.1 billion in costs. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that food waste and packaging account for nearly 45% of the materials sent to landfills in the United States.   The reason zero-waste “is not a mainstream concept, that you don’t see it in gastronomy or hospitality in mainstream ways, is because we’re just waking up to it,” said the chef Douglas McMaster, who runs the waste-free London restaurant Silo and advised the owners of Rhodora. “We’re just seeing the reality of wasting as much as we do.”   Rich and Halley Chambers, the deputy director of his Oberon restaurant group and co-owner of Rhodora, spent almost 10 months and $50,000 researching and transforming their Fort Greene space into a neighborhood joint that could operate without any trash pickup.   Out went many of their regular vendors who wrapped deliveries in single-use plastic. In came tools to aid their waste-reduction efforts: a cardboard shredder to turn wine boxes into composting material, a dishwashing setup that converts salt into soap, beeswax wrap in lieu of plastic wrap.   “It’s not arcane secret knowledge,” Rich said. “It’s just a couple things that are very specific, and you need to kind of reengineer how you think about” operating a restaurant or bar.   Much of the planning time was spent searching for distributors and producers who could adhere to Rhodora’s mission. One cheesemaker offered to remove the plastic wrapping before delivery — and then throw it in the garbage.   A handful of companies were able to accommodate the unorthodox restrictions, including She Wolf Bakery and its sister butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters, which deliver reusable plastic bins full of fresh-baked breads and jars of pickled vegetables and eggs via Cargo Bike Collective riders. Another company, A Priori Distribution, switched to using compostable packaging and paper tape when dropping off aluminum tins of fish.   “It certainly is unique, and that is new for us,” said Caroline Fidanza, culinary director of the Marlow Collective, which includes She Wolf and Marlow & Daughters. “There’s a certain amount of that that’s very doable. It’s harder to package things than to not package them on some level.”   Alongside limiting the amount of spoilable inventory Rhodora orders, Rich said, the bar eliminated any sort of chef position, partly to avoid creating “a top-down kind of vibe, where there were things being considered other than being zero waste.”   Rhodora’s staff members, who rotate duties like waiting on customers and popping sardine tins to plate food orders, congregate weekly to generate simple menu ideas based on what’s available from the bar’s dozen or so approved vendors. Cheese boards and mushroom broth are staples.   “Having a small staff playing a central role, we can be more nimble than a normal restaurant,” Chambers said.   The paper menus, which feature a miniessay on the restaurant’s green mission, are fed to the compost pile when they become outdated or tattered. Anything left on customers’ plates is dumped into collection bins in the kitchen, which are fed into the commercial-grade composter tucked inside hutches adjacent to the bar. (Rhodora does not serve meat, which is more difficult to compost, although its composter does process any fish that is left over.)   Natural wine bottles and most other noncompostable containers are removed for recycling via Royal Waste Services, which the restaurant said also accepted broken glass. Corks are donated to ReCork, a recycling program that repurposes the material for shoe soles and yoga blocks.   There are financial incentives for restaurants to invest in these zero-waste practices, with one study finding that restaurants save on average $7 for every $1 invested in kitchen food waste-reduction practices. The National Restaurant Association found that around half of diners say they are beginning to consider establishments’ efforts to recycle and reduce food waste when choosing where to eat.   But many establishments operate on slim profit margins, and it is not always immediately obvious how programs to reduce food waste can translate into financial gains, said Angel Veza, director of the Hospitality Advisory at First Principle Group, a global advisory firm. Many chefs and restaurant owners see little incentive in pursuing more environmentally friendly ways to order ingredients, much less pay an extra $800 as Rhodora does for a bin from TerraCycle. The company turns hard-to-recycle trash left behind by customers, like gum or plastic wrapping, into new goods. (Rhodora has a second bin placed in the bathroom for used hygiene products.)   “If they’re thriving, making money, they don’t have a reason to change,” said Veza. “Restaurants close all the time, too, so the last thing they’re going to think about is, ‘Am I going to use single-use plastic?’”   Though Rhodora is striving to ensure its space is zero waste, the system isn’t perfect. It hasn’t been determined, for example, what the landfill-eschewing answer is to disposing of a dishwasher beyond repair.   “I don’t want to pretend we have everything figured out,” Rich said.   The first batch of compost will be used to fertilize its minigardens on top of hutches outside the wine bar, and possibly the Brooklyn Grange’s rooftop farm at the Navy Yard. A Rhodora spokeswoman also said that compared with Rich’s previous Brooklyn restaurant venture Mettā, the business had saved an average of $300 a month in part by eliminating its trash pickup. (Chambers estimated that Mettā, which promoted itself as being a carbon-neutral and low-waste restaurant, produced 7,000 pounds of trash per month.)   “We’re at one pivot point,” Rich said. “The hope is that maybe we can influence and inspire some people above and below to learn what zero waste is, because it’s so beautifully simple not having a trash and not sending it to the landfill.”

NEW YORK — Garbage is inevitable in the restaurant and bar business. Kitchen employees toss onion skins and meat fat into the wastebasket almost instinctively. Once-used plastic wrap and slips guarding the linens find their way into black bags for trash-day pickup. Plastic bags are ordered by the bundle and then often discarded after customers use them to take leftovers home.   At the Brooklyn natural wine bar and restaurant Rhodora, however, taking out the trash works a little differently.   The new eatery is one of a handful of establishments in various cities that have begun to operate under a zero-waste ethos, meaning they do not send any trash or food waste that enters their business to a landfill. There is not even a traditional trash can on the premises.   The aim is to lessen the restaurants’ environmental effect while running a profitable venture — with a possible added benefit of solidifying their eco-conscious bona fides among discerning clientele. Such radical idealism comes with challenges, including finding producers and distributors who can accommodate requests like compostable packaging and figuring out how to recycle broken appliances.   “We’re in the business of serving people,” said Henry Rich, a co-owner of Rhodora. “And it feels incongruent to take care of somebody for an evening and try to show them a great time, and then externalize the waste and carbon footprint of that evening onto people.”   A recent report from ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on food waste reduction, found that restaurants in the United States generate about 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, or $25.1 billion in costs. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that food waste and packaging account for nearly 45% of the materials sent to landfills in the United States.   The reason zero-waste “is not a mainstream concept, that you don’t see it in gastronomy or hospitality in mainstream ways, is because we’re just waking up to it,” said the chef Douglas McMaster, who runs the waste-free London restaurant Silo and advised the owners of Rhodora. “We’re just seeing the reality of wasting as much as we do.”   Rich and Halley Chambers, the deputy director of his Oberon restaurant group and co-owner of Rhodora, spent almost 10 months and $50,000 researching and transforming their Fort Greene space into a neighborhood joint that could operate without any trash pickup.   Out went many of their regular vendors who wrapped deliveries in single-use plastic. In came tools to aid their waste-reduction efforts: a cardboard shredder to turn wine boxes into composting material, a dishwashing setup that converts salt into soap, beeswax wrap in lieu of plastic wrap.   “It’s not arcane secret knowledge,” Rich said. “It’s just a couple things that are very specific, and you need to kind of reengineer how you think about” operating a restaurant or bar.   Much of the planning time was spent searching for distributors and producers who could adhere to Rhodora’s mission. One cheesemaker offered to remove the plastic wrapping before delivery — and then throw it in the garbage.   A handful of companies were able to accommodate the unorthodox restrictions, including She Wolf Bakery and its sister butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters, which deliver reusable plastic bins full of fresh-baked breads and jars of pickled vegetables and eggs via Cargo Bike Collective riders. Another company, A Priori Distribution, switched to using compostable packaging and paper tape when dropping off aluminum tins of fish.   “It certainly is unique, and that is new for us,” said Caroline Fidanza, culinary director of the Marlow Collective, which includes She Wolf and Marlow & Daughters. “There’s a certain amount of that that’s very doable. It’s harder to package things than to not package them on some level.”   Alongside limiting the amount of spoilable inventory Rhodora orders, Rich said, the bar eliminated any sort of chef position, partly to avoid creating “a top-down kind of vibe, where there were things being considered other than being zero waste.”   Rhodora’s staff members, who rotate duties like waiting on customers and popping sardine tins to plate food orders, congregate weekly to generate simple menu ideas based on what’s available from the bar’s dozen or so approved vendors. Cheese boards and mushroom broth are staples.   “Having a small staff playing a central role, we can be more nimble than a normal restaurant,” Chambers said.   The paper menus, which feature a miniessay on the restaurant’s green mission, are fed to the compost pile when they become outdated or tattered. Anything left on customers’ plates is dumped into collection bins in the kitchen, which are fed into the commercial-grade composter tucked inside hutches adjacent to the bar. (Rhodora does not serve meat, which is more difficult to compost, although its composter does process any fish that is left over.)   Natural wine bottles and most other noncompostable containers are removed for recycling via Royal Waste Services, which the restaurant said also accepted broken glass. Corks are donated to ReCork, a recycling program that repurposes the material for shoe soles and yoga blocks.   There are financial incentives for restaurants to invest in these zero-waste practices, with one study finding that restaurants save on average $7 for every $1 invested in kitchen food waste-reduction practices. The National Restaurant Association found that around half of diners say they are beginning to consider establishments’ efforts to recycle and reduce food waste when choosing where to eat.   But many establishments operate on slim profit margins, and it is not always immediately obvious how programs to reduce food waste can translate into financial gains, said Angel Veza, director of the Hospitality Advisory at First Principle Group, a global advisory firm. Many chefs and restaurant owners see little incentive in pursuing more environmentally friendly ways to order ingredients, much less pay an extra $800 as Rhodora does for a bin from TerraCycle. The company turns hard-to-recycle trash left behind by customers, like gum or plastic wrapping, into new goods. (Rhodora has a second bin placed in the bathroom for used hygiene products.)   “If they’re thriving, making money, they don’t have a reason to change,” said Veza. “Restaurants close all the time, too, so the last thing they’re going to think about is, ‘Am I going to use single-use plastic?’”   Though Rhodora is striving to ensure its space is zero waste, the system isn’t perfect. It hasn’t been determined, for example, what the landfill-eschewing answer is to disposing of a dishwasher beyond repair.   “I don’t want to pretend we have everything figured out,” Rich said.   The first batch of compost will be used to fertilize its minigardens on top of hutches outside the wine bar, and possibly the Brooklyn Grange’s rooftop farm at the Navy Yard. A Rhodora spokeswoman also said that compared with Rich’s previous Brooklyn restaurant venture Mettā, the business had saved an average of $300 a month in part by eliminating its trash pickup. (Chambers estimated that Mettā, which promoted itself as being a carbon-neutral and low-waste restaurant, produced 7,000 pounds of trash per month.)   “We’re at one pivot point,” Rich said. “The hope is that maybe we can influence and inspire some people above and below to learn what zero waste is, because it’s so beautifully simple not having a trash and not sending it to the landfill.”   This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

INDUSTRY BRIEFS

Bausch + Lomb (B+L), in collaboration with TerraCycle, donated custom training modules to the Guide Dog Foundation. The training modules—including benches, tables, waste stations, and an agility ramp—were made from used contact lens materials collected through the Bausch + Lomb One by One Recycling Program as well as other recycled material. The donation was funded through the Bausch Foundation.

In response to the August 2019 article by Drs. Karen K. Yeung and Robert Davis titled “The Environmental Impact of Contact Lens Waste,” I want to commend the authors for raising awareness about this important environmental issue. While the article is correct that “all of the waste related to contact lenses is now recyclable,” the chart on page 29, which categorizes the types of plastics used in contact lenses, bottles, and packaging, incorrectly states that contact lens materials are recyclable through municipal recycling programs.   As an active fitter of primarily daily disposable lenses, I have heard concern from patients about the waste associated with contact lenses. An incorrect assumption on my part, which many others share, was that you can recycle used lenses and their packaging (e.g., blister packs and top foils) in standard recycling bins.   However, I have since learned that even though these used contact lens materials are made from recyclable material (via the #5 polypropylene symbol), their small size can cause them to either contaminate other recyclable materials or get diverted to landfills when they are recycled through standard recycling bins. In fact, The Association of Plastic Recyclers states that the recycling industry’s standard screen size, which identifies and removes unrecyclable plastics, filters out materials that measure less than two inches in diameter (https://plasticsrecycling.org/200-apr-design-guide/quick-links/pla-tabs/834-dimensions ). This means that standard recycling facilities often fail to process these small items.   While this may be shocking, there is a program available in which eyecare practitioners and their patients can participate to prevent these materials from ending up in our environment: the Bausch + Lomb One by One Recycling program. This program, currently the only contact lens recycling program in the United States, is conducted in collaboration with TerraCycle, a global leader in collecting and repurposing hard-to-recycle waste. Used contact lens waste from any contact lens manufacturer is accepted through the program.   My practice participates in the program as part of our overall goal to become more environmentally responsible, and this has been embraced by both my patients and staff. We have several bins (provided by Bausch + Lomb) throughout the office that we fill with our own lenses, blister packs, and top foils used during the fitting process. We strongly encourage our patients to bring their used materials to recycle in our bins as well. These bins are separate from the municipal recycling bins that we have in our practice, which we use for recycling paper, water bottles, etc. Once the bins are full, we download the program’s free shipping label and ship all of the used items to TerraCycle, where they are processed.   Given the vast amount of plastic waste that is generated by contact lenses and lens packaging each year, it’s crucial for us all to understand the importance of recycling and the way in which we can properly recycle these used contact lens materials, especially because many patients are still unaware that their lenses can be recycled. It’s one way that we can together ensure that these materials don’t end up impacting us in the future.   Gina Wesley, OD, MS, Complete Eyecare of Medina, Medina, MN. Dr. Wesley has received remuneration and travel funding from Bausch + Lomb.   Response from Drs. Yeung and Davis   We thank Dr. Wesley for her comments regarding our August 2019 article. This is an important endeavor to preserve our environment for future generations. We can only reduce pollution by recycling contact lens blister packages and their foils as well as contact lens solution bottles. The contact lens blister packages have the number 5 recycle symbol, as noted in Dr. Wesley’s letter to the editor. This can be interpreted by consumers as a freely recyclable material. Dr. Wesley correctly points out that due to the filtering process at normal recycling plants, these small plastic blister packs cannot be sorted; they fall through and are not recycled. Only TerraCycle has created a process in which these contact lens materials can be correctly recycled.   Another option is to take the plastic blister packs and place them in a number 5 recyclable plastic bottle that can be recycled as one unit. The foils would need to be pulled from the blister pack to be recycled separately.   Contact lens blister packs are just one example of the need to educate consumers on how to properly recycle these products. Another example is plastic bottle caps that fall through the sorting process. It is recommended in some communities that bottles are recycled with the caps left on. By recycling these materials properly, they can be melted into plastic that can be remolded to make recycled products.   We want to thank Dr. Wesley for her statement to the editor, adding to the body of knowledge for recycling contact lenses and their related materials properly. CLS

Gerber, an early childhood nutrition manufacturer, has partnered with international recycling company TerraCycle® to help give hard-to-recycle baby food packaging a new life. This partnership is rooted in Gerber and TerraCycle’s shared values around eliminating waste and supports the recovery of hard-to-recycle baby food packaging on a national scale.       “Through this free recycling program, Gerber is offering parents an easy way to divert waste from landfills by providing a responsible way to dispose of certain hard-to-recycle baby food packaging,” said TerraCycle chief executive officer and founder, Tom Szaky. “By collecting and recycling these items, families can demonstrate their respect for the environment not only through the products that they choose for their children, but also with how they dispose of the packaging.”   As an added incentive, for every pound of packaging waste sent to TerraCycle through the Gerber Recycling Program, collectors can earn $1 to donate to a non-profit, school or charitable organization of their choice. Gerber believes the baby food industry should help create a world where babies thrive, and this partnership is one of many steps toward its goal to achieve 100 percent recyclable or reusable packaging by 2025.   The Gerber Recycling Program is open to any interested individual, school, office, or community organization. Participation in the program is easy. Interested parties can sign up on the Gerber Recycling Program webpage and mail in packaging that is not municipally recyclable using a prepaid shipping label.   Once collected, the packaging is cleaned and melted into hard plastic that can be remolded to make new recycled products.   Participation in the program is easy interested parties can sign up on the Gerber Recycling Program page at https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/gerber.

NEW YORK — Garbage is inevitable in the restaurant and bar business. Kitchen employees toss onion skins and meat fat into the wastebasket almost instinctively. Once-used plastic wrap and slips guarding the linens find their way into black bags for trash-day pickup. Plastic bags are ordered by the bundle and then often discarded after customers use them to take leftovers home. At the Brooklyn natural wine bar and restaurant Rhodora, however, taking out the trash works a little differently.